Another crack in the ACT Labor/Greens alliance?
I thought I was dreaming this morning when I heard on the radio that Chief Turnip Jon Stanhope intends on removing bicycles from Northbourne Avenue and moving them back to their rightful place on off-road cycle paths. He even, apparently, wants to move the buses our of the already over-congested left lane of Northbourne Avenue.
It was the (lack of sane) planning of the Stanhope government which gave us on-road cycle lanes on busy roads, many of which are 80km/h zones. Northbourne doesn’t fit in to the 80km/h category, but it fits an even more dangerous category for combining cars and bicycles, it’s a super-busy road with buses which have to stop in the bicycle lanes constantly.
I’m pleased to see this policy backflip. It’s good news for cyclists and motorists alike, but it must surely put the fragile partnership between ACT Labor and the ACT Greens under further strain. The Greens have already been shafted by Labor on many occasions, and now it looks like one of the Greens key policies is the exact opposite of Labor’s policy.
The Greens believe in having more bicycles on the road and less cars on the road. Labor apparently believes in the opposite now. How they’ll work this one out when the Greens are in favour of making it difficult to even own a car in the suburbs, let alone use one on a main road, is beyond me.
With any luck, now that Labor has adopted the sensible policy of removing bicycles from our roads and placing them back on the cycle paths, the Labor/Greens partnership is dead, and we won’t have to have any more pandering to the peculiar ideas of the enviro-socialists.
Samuel
April 23rd, 2010 at 11:26am